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What is the difference between morphs and allomorphs?

Morphs and allomorphs are both ways to describe the phonetic expressions (that is, the actual sounds produced) of the smallest meaningful parts of language in the study of morphology: morphemes.


A word like "unhappy" has two meaningful pieces: "un" and "happy," which together convey the meaning "not happy." Each of the meaningful parts is a morpheme, the phonetic expression of which is called a morph. Morphs can be further classified into "lexical" or "grammatical": lexical morphs are the meaningful roots, like "happy" or "man," and these are often free-standing words. Grammatical morphs modify the root in a meaningful way, but may not stand as a free word; in English, suffixes like [-able] or prefixes like [un-] are grammatical morphs. 


Allomorphs are phonetic variants of a morph. A good example of allomorphy is the plural suffix in English, which can have the allomorphs [-s], [-z], or [-ez] depending on the phonetic environment.


One way of looking at this is that any allomorph is simply what you call a morph that has another possible phonetic expression. 

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